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There was a bumblebee on her pillow. And that—that wasn’t a dream. Signy knew the bee to be real before she opened her eyes. The sound she’d been hearing wasn’t an engine, unless you could call a vibrating thorax an engine, which perhaps you could. No one was calling her name, though. The only person who would was still asleep.

The presence of the bee was confusing, because bees were kept in the gardens, and Signy hadn’t been taking an afternoon nap among her plants. It was morning, early morning, and she was curled up in bed. Her bed, her bedroom. She belonged there; a bee did not.

Signy opened her eyes, and sure enough, there the little incongruity trudged, just a hand’s length from her nose. Signy watched the creature calmly. Its antennae twitched. Its abdomen ballooned and contracted with lungless breath. It paused in its march, turned a few degrees to the side, and rattled its wings in a brief, irritated burr. The aimlessness of these actions made Signy think of a person standing on a street corner, squinting at signs and wondering where the day had gone wrong.

Street corners. Another thing Signy hadn’t seen in a long time.

“How did you get here?” she whispered. She slunk from beneath her nest of blankets, slid off her side of the bed, and crouched down, coaxing the errant insect into her hand. Bumblebees did not take kindly to being prodded, so Signy guided it with only the barest touch of her fingertip. The bee voiced its protest with another buzz, but did not take flight. A night spent away from the hive’s huddled warmth had exhausted the poor thing, and taking to the air would cost more energy than the bee could afford to spend. Better for it to simply march along and grumble curses at a universe that had allowed any of this to happen.

The bee’s tiny feet tickled their way to the center of Signy’s palm. She cupped her hand bit by bit, then placed her other hand over it, creating a protective hollow. She wasn’t afraid of being stung. Bombus astralis’ stinger had been engineered away long ago. Signy was glad of this fact, as she worked in that species’ company daily, but she also found it somewhat unfair. If she were the size of another animal’s thumbnail, she’d want a built-in dagger, too. History suggested she wouldn’t use it, but even so. It was the principle of the thing.

Quietly as she could, Signy tiptoed across the room, holding her captured treasure below her sternum. The lights set into the cave walls were starting to glow deep orange, and the stone floor beneath her bare feet warmed in concert. Daybreak, or what passed for it within a moonlet’s heart. The air sighing through the ceiling filters had yet to shed its electronically regulated chill, but Signy couldn’t throw on clothing with her hands clasped like this, and she remained as naked as she’d been in her dream. What she could manage was slipping into her clogs, which was good, because there were plenty of things in the gardens she didn’t want on or in her feet.

“We’re going, we’re going,” she whispered to the bee as it began to explore the boundaries of Signy’s mirrored palms. She stepped over a vine trailing near the doorway, its roots buried in one of the many cuplike planters carved in beside the wall lights. At some point, Signy would cut the vine back, but for now, it wasn’t hurting itself, and it wasn’t getting in her way.

The hall was still dark enough that a night-light activated as Signy stepped through the threshold, robing her in soft light and illuminating the path ahead. She walked these corridors every day, and yet, she always loved the sight of them. They’d been cut to give the impression that these spaces had simply happened, rather than been requested by humans and constructed by bots. When the bunker had first been built, she’d been told what sort of rock her new home was nestled in, but she’d long since forgotten its name. Many things in existence made Signy ravenous for detail—made her scrabble for scraps of information she’d clutch to her chest forever. Geology wasn’t one of them. She loved the nameless rock anyway, loved the walkways smooth as molded clay, loved the unpolished patches that glittered when they caught the light. Sometimes loving a thing meant learning everything about it; sometimes loving the surface was enough.

More vines appeared as she neared the gardens—passionflower and honeysuckle, mostly. If plants could make their way past human-designated boundaries, it wasn’t a stretch to imagine an inquisitive bumblebee wriggling its way through a seam in a door. Even so, Signy didn’t want this catch-and-release excursion to become habitual. She’d investigate, at some point. Or, more likely, she’d put find bee escape routes on the household’s shared to-do list. That sort of task wasn’t her strong suit.

The hallway split into three paths leading to three destinations: the test garden, the vault garden, and the medicine garden. It was at this junction that a problem surfaced, and Signy might have realized it from the start if she’d been more than nominally awake. There were two gardens this bee might have come from, and she didn’t know which. Even if she had, each garden had multiple hives. Bumblebees weren’t aggressive, but they didn’t like strangers that smelled different than their siblings, and an attempted immigrant might well be chased away, forced to spend another night in the cold, then another, perhaps another, until finally, time ran out.

The bee buzzed again, the sound becoming high-pitched and distressed. Signy wanted to conclude the bee’s bad night as quickly as possible, but she also didn’t want to make its situation worse. “Where do you live?” she sighed. It wasn’t a question so much as a grim proclamation, because there was no way to determine the answer. There was a chance, Signy reasoned, that if the bee was inclined to gather some pollen or nectar before heading to a new home, the established residents might accept these gifts and allow the straggler in. It was only a chance, but also the only real hope remaining at this point. And in the end, this wasn’t on Signy to fix. It was the bee who’d chosen to head somewhere new. Not all gambles ended well.

As the correct choice of garden was impossible to determine, Signy opted instead for thematic appropriateness. She went down the left branch of the hallway, the one the vines stretched out from. This was the test garden, a place of wild experiments that sometimes worked, sometimes didn’t, and rarely went as planned. An apt location for a little explorer to try its luck. If luck wasn’t on the bee’s side, well, at least the garden was beautiful.

She approached the door, pushed it open with the side of her hip, and the world turned green.

The air changed, filling with different textures, different scents. Moderate humidity. Nectar and loam. She passed various patches and planters, some covered with hutches to keep their residents isolated, some left free to spread as they pleased. The plants here were, for the most part, an eccentric mélange, tied by neither purpose nor origin. Signy loved all of her gardens dearly, but this was her favorite by far. This was the one she allowed to overgrow.

“Almost there,” she said to the bee. She glanced toward the cavern wall behind the safflower patch, where one of the hives stood. “Your sisters will be awake soon.” Their industrious buzzing was absent from the air, as was to be expected at this hour. The sunlamps in the garden were still warming, just as they had been in Signy’s bedroom. Every space within the moonlet kept to the same simulated calendar, down to the last second. It didn’t matter that this timekeeping didn’t match the moonlet’s orbital period, or its distance from the sun. Earth days and Earth seasons were what everyone who lived within these caverns—plants, bees, and humans—needed to stay healthy, even though none of them had ever known that planet. It was vital for the clock outside of you to match the meter within.

One portion of the test garden did have a unified purpose, and it was this that Signy approached. She’d never seen a real meadow, a meadow that happened on its own, but she’d been entranced by the idea in her adolescence. Here, in one of the middle chapters of her life, she’d created the best proxy she could. There’d been a place on Fortune called “the Meadow,” but it was bullshit. An under-watered lawn of bluegrass trimmed short beneath a projector dome where people could flirt with the idea of enjoying the outdoors. As a child, she hadn’t seen the point of playing on grass, and once she learned what a meadow actually was, she’d hated “the Meadow.” A real meadow wasn’t trimmed short. A real meadow wasn’t monochrome. A real meadow was a carnival, a dense weave that looked green at a distance, but the closer you got, the more colors you saw, the more shapes, the more species. Nature did not favor homogeneity. Complexity was always key.

That was the quality she’d nurtured in the tangled patch before her now. A meadow, as best as she could conjure underground. Grasses, flowers, short scrub. The simulated calendar currently placed them in late spring, and the climate conditions in this garden were temperate. As a result, the meadow was bursting with soft new leaves, vivacious colors, and freely offered sugar—everything her grousing passenger could want.

Signy uncupped her hands slowly, peering inside, hoping the combination of light and fragrant air might spur the bee into flying off.

The bee did no such thing. It stood in the middle of her palm, abdomen pulsing steady. Signy had, on occasion, looked at a bee’s corpse under her microscope, and she always marveled at how much their spiracles looked like the stomata of plants—structures both built for breathing. All of evolution’s infinite branches, and yet, so much boiled down to the same basic forms. Some arrangements just worked.

The smell of the warming grass made Signy feel as relaxed as she’d felt in bed, and for a moment, she forgot why she’d come to the garden in the first place. She was never alone in a garden, not even when she was the only person present. No inhabited place could ever be lonely, not if she took a moment to stop the stupid human inclination of sorting life into categories. Plants, animals, protists—useful delineations to a point, but when you got right down to it, who cared? It was so much cleaner, so much more honest, to view everything as an organism. Signy was an organism. The bee in her hand was an organism. The grass brushing her bare knees was an organism. The unseen fungi lacing the dirt, the unseen bacteria she and the bee and the grass exchanged through exhaled air—organisms, one and all. A garden was a quiet place; it was anything but empty.

Signy spotted a particular plant, one that would be either a perfect stop for the bee to pick up some pollen for its new neighbors or the kindest grave she could think to offer. Fragaria cypsela, a strawberry variety of her own design. It wasn’t as sweet as Fragaria astralis, but it was far less prone to mold and not half as fussy. Her goal with this strain had been to mimic the traits listed in the one sparse description she’d managed to scrounge from the Primer about what wild strawberries on Earth were like: easy to propagate, tolerant of a wide variety of moisture levels, hardy enough to survive a brush with fire. A much better choice for a meadow—or, at least, for her understanding of a meadow, however accurate that was.

She crouched down in front of the strawberry plant and spread her palm beside a scattering of open blooms. At last, here was something the bee understood. Living up to its name, the bee bumbled toward the flower and stuck its weary head right in. Signy smiled. Whether the bee lived or died was beyond her. She’d done what was in her power to do, and that was always enough.

As the bee luxuriated in pollen, Signy found a plant of the same species that was bearing fruit (technically, in botanical terms, strawberries weren’t a true fruit, but as she was about to eat them, she could live with the culinary definition and spare herself the pedantry). She plucked a strawberry, then another, and another still. Her knees wouldn’t put up with this for long, but for the duration of a snack, they could hush.

Signy ate. The bee, she was glad to see, did the same.

Interstitial

As the only “voices” your rorqual will ever experience are likely to be yours and the occasional veterinarian’s, they appreciate learning about the perspectives of other people—be they people you know personally, or in the broader sense of human society. You may need to volunteer these, however, as rorquals’ naturally solitary behavior makes them disinclined to seek alternative views without suggestion.

Chapter 2 Cora, Fortune

Going back to Fortune was always hard. Not, like, mechanically, obviously. Atmospheric reentry was something people had down pat before there’d been any people on Fortune at all. Rough as the ride was, Cora was used to it. Turbulence? Heavy Gs? Shitty weather? Easy peasy. No, what was hard for Cora right then—strapped to her seat, looking out the window, eating a bag of spud chips—was she was traveling in the opposite direction of where she most wanted to be.

She wasn’t any more torn up than usual, though. This was her rhythm, and she knew it well. Every few weeks, she got on a shuttle like this one and left the planet behind. For a week or two after, she was happily installed in the saddle, brain synced up and the rest forgotten. A few days after that were spent in the stables, resting in a recovery room. Then a shuttle back down, then home to the dorms, then a couple weeks of mandatory off-time before her next call. A predictable cycle of excitement, bliss, confusion, sadness, boredom, and impatience, ’round and ’round and ’round.